Chris Pottinger is a musician and visual artist residing in the metro Detroit area who creates music using synthesizers and other unusual electronic instruments. Performing solo under the name Cotton Museum, this project began in 2002, developed from an interest in experimental electronic sounds. He has performed on recordings which have been released locally under his own label, Tasty Soil Records, and through various labels in countries such as Italy, the United Kingdom and Egypt. Cotton Museum’s name stems from the deformed lumpy creatures that adorn the album covers, and the sounds created are inspired by the artwork that he’s developed to enhance each release.

COTTON MUSEUM DISCOGRAPHY

VINYL RECORDINGS(In order from newest to oldest)

COTTON MUSEUM "HATCHING EXTRACTION" 12" LP (2012)

Primarily composed using a Serge modular synthesizer, Roland Space-Echo and other custom electronic instruments. Eight tracks of horrid electronics clocking in at just over 40 minutes.

Crawling and claustrophobic sounds of nocturnal rituals. Experiments performed deep beneath the tangled roots. A regiment of dripping sap pumping life into swollen larvae. Hatching and squirming, emerging from their eggs. Forever entombed and secluded within the earth, fearing the sounds of a life underground.

Limited to 500 hand numbered copies, complete with double sided insert and digital download card. Recorded July 2011 through January 2012 in Detroit, MI. Artwork, layout and recording by Chris Pottinger.

— Tasty Soil press release

FRONT COVER

BACK COVER

ETCHING

COTTON MUSEUM"PUS PUSTULES" 12" LP (2009)

PUS PUSTULES” is one of the most diseased COTTON MUSEUM recordings to date. Clocking in at 21 minutes on side A, adorned with with a detailed etching of sickly beasts on side B and a five color silk screened album cover designed by Chris Pottinger. Theremin, Synth, and other odd electronic instruments create a bubbling cesspool of rotting sounds that leak from your stereo speakers like a cancerous sludge. Take a trip through a strange world where you can hear these sickly beasts devouring corpses while insects sting their bodies, leaving them covered with infected welts.Cotton Museum is a solo electronic noise project from visual artist Chris Pottinger that has been performing for the past seven years. Limited edition of 400 hand numbered copies, black vinyl with thick chipboard album cover.

— Tasty Soil press release

The new LP by Cotton Museum, the solo Michigan noise project by Chris Pottinger, reveals the electronic producer’s gifts as an artist of extremes. On one side is a shapeshifting sound piece that swings between fluttering ambient metal and grinding industrial klang; on the other are engraved drawings of Pottinger’s hyper-gory, ooze-excreting creatures that populate his visual work. The cover art is of a piece unto itself: it’s a five-color screen print using mainly kidney-color pinks, muted blue-grays and subterranean earth tones. This otherworldly marriage of sound and vision on the aptly titled Pus Pustules can’t be ignored, and it’s impossible to imagine one working without the other. It’s a neo-pagan feast for the senses. Or the senseless, if you prefer. Although Pottinger uses the same grubby palette in his other Detroit-based musical projects — including Odd Clouds and Slither, the horns plus electronic effects duo with Heath Moerland of Sick Llama — the direction on PP begins a slow tease toward a newly developing sophistication.This has been coming, arguably, since Cotton Museum’s 2007 split 12-inch with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and other untitled works (released on the Italian Qbico label the following year) that included a loop broadcast continually for months during the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Shrinking Cities exhibition, heard by anyone within range of Odd Clouds’ Get Lost house in northwest Hamtramck. On his new piece, Pottinger launches a drone that stays largely in the midrange, with occasional plunges into darker, sub-bass territory and high-end bursts that sound like treated flutes or — more appropriate imagery to suit Cotton Museum’s deviant body of work — the hollowed out femur of a cave bear. It’s the call of something wild wriggling out there in the murky bottoms of an ancient world, at once alien and strangely human.

THURSTON MOORE / COTTON MUSEUMSPLIT 12" LP (2007)

Two dudes over 6 feet tall making totally fucked noise. THURSTON MOORE is on side A, putting you into a reverb junk zone a hundred feet under the ground where you can actually hear the grubs boring holes through the dirt & sucking the flesh off your dead pets corpse. COTTON MUSEUM is on side B creating theremin & loop scum, super rotted style. Skulls scraping on rib bones over and over. Created to keep your mind off of the insect eggs that were laid in your eye sockets. Try sticking a patch cable right into an open sore and it would probably sound something like this record. Limited to 500 Copies w/ 3 color Pro-Screen printed covers with art by Chris Pottinger. Tasty Soils first official LP release!! Each copy is numbered out of 500.

COTTON MUSEUM"CRIPPLED SLOTH" 10" LP (2004) Scratch N' Sniff

Chris Pottinger (aka Cotton Museum,) has been producing mind melting heavy pedal psychedelic power noise for over three years now. His sonic arsenal of sound scramblers consists of a theremin, rewired/rerouted electronic toys, various button and knob-adorned noize boxes, mixers, and two human arms that seem to work as eight. As a result of years spent honing, crafting, and experimenting, Pottinger has carved out a disorienting sound, a distinctive style that is unmistakably Cotton Museum’s own which leaves him standing all by himself, waaayyy out in left field of the American weirdo underground electronics scene.

Cotton Museum has had a prolific existence, releasing many now out-of-print titles on a number of independent cdr and tape labels, including his own I Hate To Rock imprint. He has collaborated in the past with John Olson and Aaron Dilloway (of Ann Arbor sound-demolish unit, and current Sub Pop recording artists, Wolf Eyes,) as a member of the trio Ugly Museum (cassette release on American Tapes,) and has shared a recent lathe cut split 7” with Baltimore’s preeminent noise freak-os, Nautical Almanac. His past release on SNSE, Cut Up Bugs (SNSE034,) has long since sold out it’s two pressings.

In addition to his musical talents, Pottinger is also an accomplished illustrator, adorning each of his Cotton Museum releases with warped and drippy, yet finely detailed drawings of perverse snakes, alien-inspired insects, and bug-eyed monsters. The summer of 2004 saw his drawings featured as part of a gallery show in Tokyo, Japan, which was curated by New York City’s renowned Little Cakes art collective.

Crippled Sloth is Cotton Museum’s first “official” vinyl release. It is pressed in a limited edition of 300 copies on yellow vinyl and features silkscreened covers and inserts.

— Scratch N' Sniff Records press release

CD-R's

(In order from newest to oldest)

COTTON MUSEUM "CREATURE & CD ART SET VOL. 1" (2006)

Discogs link here.

The creature is reproduced in full color with 10mm thick lamination, custom designed color cardstock foldover with the CD mounted to the back of the creature. Limited to 100 numbered copies.

COTTON MUSEUM "CUT UP BUGS" (2003) Scratch N' Sniff Records

Discogs link here.

Screen printed slip case w/ black CD-r & insert.

Cotton Museum wraps your head in modified theremins,re-wired electronic toys, and other more traditionalinstruments such as fish wire and plastic bags. Timebegins to fold into space and pack itself into asqueezebox full of anti-matter minithins. On thisouting, Pottinger dons the protective radiationgoggles and proceeds to laser-chop-chop a pile ofsquiggly-wigglys. Are those screams of delight? Orcries of pain? Only the worms know for sure, andthey’re in the 4th dimension... Packaged inscreen-printed black cardboard sleeves, these areblack-on-black cdrs with a tiny label on one side,meant to look like a little fucking record, forchrissakes! 

— Scratch N' Sniff Records press release

COTTON MUSEUM"EXPOSED ORGANS" (2003) IHTR018

Discogs link here.

Sharp theremin tones, broken toy loops & destroyed effects. Skull creatures on a rampage cutting everyones chests open just to see whats inside. Recorded over the past 3 months, some of my fav stuff. Limited to 50 hand numbered copies w/ new art.

— IHTR Records press release

FRONT COVER

BACK COVER

COTTON MUSEUM "POISON WORMS" (2003)

Discogs link here.

Limited to 40 copies.

live recording at WCBN, ann arbor on 2/21/03 “theremin sounds and broken toys melt all the snow from the ground so weird looking birds can fly freely, until they eat some dangerous worms” limited to 50 hand numbered copies with new art featuring a vomiting bird & worm!

COTTON MUSEUM "THIS OLD MAN DOESN'T HAVE ANY HANDS" (2002)

Discogs link here.

First COTTON MUSEUM release! Limited to 40 copes.

Another hard electro disc comes up in the changer. Who sent me this? I’m not sure what it is. Pretty good shit in the no-beat electro-void vein. Electronic power splunge highly committed enough that it’s quite easy to imagine William Bennett himself having a tizzy fit over it. Thank god he doesn’t, now I can actually listen instead of just cower against the wall. Okay, I’m thinking this is that Cotton Museum disc I got from Hanson Records. It’s not released by Hanson, but that’s who sent it to me. More and more from Michigan, this time the town of Lake Orion to be exact. Hard fry free-fall music, just as obtuse as, say, Kevin Drumm but crazier (haven’t heard KD’s Miasma yet though, I’m sure it’s pretty raging).

— Blastitude Magazine

CASSETTES, COMPILATIONS, DVD's & MISC.(In order from newest to oldest)

COTTON MUSEUM / SICK LLAMA"PURPLE HAXXXE" (2006) FT054

VARIOUS ARTISTSTASTY SOIL DVD (2006) Tasty Soil TS005

Discogs link here.

The first in an ongoing series of live sets from tasty soil bands & freinds! This volume contains three sets from the theremin & electronics weirdo Cotton Museum, two sets from the primative horn hermits named Odd Clouds and the imfamous “Surgery Part 1” set from detroits strangest performance artist Jamie Easter. Most videos filmed & professionally edited together with multiple camera angles by filmographer Natasha Beste! 50 dvd’s total!! 